Mark Anderson Associate Professor of Anthropology, UCSC Mark Anderson is an anthropologist who works on the politics of race and culture, particularly in the Americas. He is currently working on a project tentatively titled Anthropology and Race/Racism: From The Harlem Renaissance to Decolonizing the Discipline, which traces anthropological approaches to race/racism from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Due to a medical emergency, this event has been cancelled. – April 12, 2014 Kris Alexanderson "Transoceanic Politics and Dutch Maritime Conciliation in East Asia during the 1930s" Kris Alexanderson’s current work examines the collaborative efforts of the Netherlands East Indies’ colonial administration, Dutch shipping businesses, and Dutch foreign consulates in port cities across the […]

Susan Harding Professor of Anthropology, UCSC Susan Harding’s recent work explores the nexus of secularism, Christian revivalism, Civil Rights, and decolonialization as they imploded in the controversy over a federally funded elementary school curriculum in Anthropology. She reads the curriculum as a national secularizing project that triggered Christian efforts to regulate secularism.

Morten Axel Pedersen Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Copenhagen Morten Axel Pedersen has conducted fieldwork in Mongolia, the Russian Far East, and Western China on topics as diverse as shamanism, political cosmology, post-socialist transition, infrastructure, social networks, and hope. He is currently completing a comparative ethnography of Chinese resource-extraction projects in Mongolia and Mozambique.

This talk is located in a shattered, yet intelligible zone defined by being in life without wanting the world--a state traversing misery and detachment that, the talk claims, is well-known to historically structurally subordinated people (people of color, of non-normative sexuality, proletarianized laborers . . .). Reading with Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely), […]

Martin Holbraad Professor Social Anthropology, University College London and Co-Director of Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture Research Group (CROC) Martin Holbraad's main field research is in Cuba, where he focuses on Afro-Cuban religions and revolutionary politics. Author of Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago, 2012). Holbraad currently directs a major comparative […]

Despina Kakoudaki’s work focuses on literature, film, visual and cultural studies, and the history of technology. Her new book, titled Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People, traces our fascination with mechanical and constructed people, such as robots, cyborgs, androids and automata. Despina Kakoudaki is Associate Professor at American […]

All graduate students are welcome but an RSVP is required by May 19th. Contact ihr@ucsc.edu to RSVP and request seminar readings. Despina Kakoudaki’s work focuses on literature, film, visual and cultural studies, and the history of technology. Her forthcoming book, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People, traces our […]

Gopal Balakrishan Professor, History of Consciousness, UCSC Offering an intellectual history of the phases of Marx's thought from his dissertation on Greek philosophy to The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Gopal Balakrishnan seeks to explain why the emergent syntheses of this early Marx broke down in the aftermath of the failures of the revolutions of […]